Phileo
The Love of Friendship
Taking its original meaning from the related word Philos, which means “friend,” phileo is the most common term in Greek for love. It refers to the love that one has for a friend or acquaintance. Phileo is love on the level of casual friendship, the affection we have for someone we are familiar with. Because of its general and casual nature, phileo is not the kind of love you need to get married to. Marriage requires a deeper, more focused love than phileo provides. If a married couple feels the same toward each other as they do toward their casual friends, their marriage is headed for trouble. Phileo is a common experience for all of us because we are social creatures by nature. We are naturally attracted to other people who share similar interests with us or in whom we find a kindred spirit. True friendship is the spice of life. A friend is someone with whom we can share our deepest thoughts and our inmost selves, often more so than we can with family members. We all need the nourishment of meaningful relationships with a few really good friends. Phileo describes that kind of relationship. True friendship is the spice of life. As positive and beneficial to our lives, as this friendship love is, however, phileo does not qualify as the highest and deepest form of love. Phileo often develops certain characteristics that can create problems in the relationship if we are not careful. One of these is a sense of obligation. Because it is based so frequently on mutual attraction and similarities, phileo can easily become a relationship of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” We feel obligated to respond to each other because of our relationship. Another common characteristic of phileo is that it tends to focus on personalities and physical attraction. This is natural and there is nothing wrong with it as long as we don’t confuse it with “true love.” Personality traits and physical characteristics change over time, so they alone are not reliable factors upon which to base a permanent, long-term relationship. This emphasis on personality and physical attraction often results in a phileo relationship that is based on mutual compatibility. One reason friendships develop is because the people involved feel that they are compatible with each other to some degree or another. This is fine for a casual friendship, but many people look at “compatibility” as a criterion for a potential spouse. The main problem with that idea is that two people in a long-term relationship who are “compatible,” or very much alike, may feel that they are competing with each other, which can lead to contention. In my experience, the most successful relationships usually involve two people who are either opposites or at least very different from each other. Because of their differences, they balance each other out, complementing and adding to each other. With relationships as with magnets, opposites indeed attract. With these kinds of criteria, phileo tends to be a “conditional” love: As long as certain conditions exist, the relationship exists. If those conditions change, so does the relationship. Conditions in a relationship create expectations, and expectations inevitably result in disappointment. This is why a conditional relationship is insufficient for building a long-term commitment such as marriage. Spouses should certainly be each other’s best friend they should have a phileo characterized by tender affection but more than that is needed to sustain their relationship over the long term.
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